“Rather, I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell. “
Why I Am Not a Maker
Debbie Chachra – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/
I found this passage by Debbie Chachra to be a great summary of her piece in general. Chachra brings to light issues surrounding invisible digital labor and the gendered divide in production or “maker” culture. Having read social computing articles related to the issue of valuable production, specifically within social communities, I am interested in the intersection between social digital economies and Chachra’s framing of maker culture as a reflection of a “gendered, capitalist,” and physically-oriented social structure. (Chachra 2015) Indeed, online communities like Facebook (an example that Chachra brings up in her article) often have a divide between “makers” (content creators) and “non-makers” (community moderators); Chachra’s reference to this specific “non-maker” profession reminds me of an article that reflected on the trauma that many Facebook community moderators suffered due to their seeing of explicit content. It is difficult to categorize the outcome of their labor as anything tangible (compared to, say, the content poster who deliberately churns out images or videos that can readily be interacted with and consumed), but their work certainly leaves a lasting impact on both themselves and the community. It is this focus on the tangible results of digital technologies that mitigates the intangible impacts that non-makers leave, impacts that directly influence consumers and audiences but cannot necessarily be numerically measured. When considering the advent of companies that espouse their products as “Software-as-a-Service,” we recognize a discourse that is beginning to treat code itself, something that is already viewed as an intangible but existing piece of labor that does not directly produce physical wages or outcomes but rather conducts the capitalistic transfer between labor and currency, as an outcome of valuable labor itself; how would one even begin to assess the value of, say, teachers or educators that create digital environments or systems that directly influence but do not directly contribute to the capitalist currency flow, when there is already such an emphasis on digital products that is already inherently commodified and consumerist in nature? This path of discourse leads to further questions that can be encapsulated under the digital humanities umbrella, specifically those that inherently question the status of humanities within a capitalistic and gendered environment. I would be interested in learning more about the discourse surrounding digital spaces, how digital technologies are subverted by humanistic inquiries, the theoretical approach to digital humanities and open-sourced projects (ie. free-flow of information, etc), and how underrepresented groups of humanities researchers and participants can reclaim digital spaces for themselves.
